From the large British drugstore chains Boots and Superdrug to the upscale department store Selfridges, K-beauty has moved beyond specialist online retailers and into the daily lives of British consumers.
In a recent interview with Seoul Economic Daily in Seoul's Jongno District, UK cosmetic safety assessor Sarah Robb said K-beauty has moved past being a passing trend and become a permanent presence in the market. "Western brands see K-beauty not as a simple fad but as the ideal standard they should aspire to," she said.
In Britain, cosmetics must undergo a safety assessment by a qualified safety assessor before they can be sold to the public. Robb is regarded as one of Britain's leading K-beauty specialists, having prepared safety assessment reports for major K-beauty brands such as Medicube and Anua since around 2020.
She stressed that K-beauty's popularity is now reshaping the vocabulary and product development practices of the Western cosmetics industry. "When I first came across a K-beauty 'ampoule mask,' I couldn't understand how an ampoule, which means a small glass vial, could be a mask," Robb said. "But now even Western brands use the term ampoule for their cosmetics, just as K-beauty does." She added, "Terms created within Korea's beauty culture have spread to the West and come to signify quality, expertise and efficacy, so Western brands are now making active use of them."
A similar shift is under way in ingredients, she said. "When a particular ingredient is used in Korean cosmetics, the ingredient itself becomes a trend," Robb said, citing PDRN as a prime example. "Consumers show little resistance even to the fact that PDRN is derived from salmon sperm," she said. "They accept it positively simply because it is an ingredient used in K-beauty products, and Western brands are using these ingredients as well."
She named Medicube as the K-beauty brand that has left the strongest impression on her. "A few years ago I tried Medicube's Zero Pore Pad myself, was won over by the results and bought one for my daughter right away," Robb said. "At the time perhaps one in 10 British people would have known the brand Medicube, but now almost everyone would."
APR (278470) has indeed posted rapid growth, with revenue in Britain growing more than tenfold (quadruple-digit growth) in the first half of this year from a year earlier. Its most popular product is the Zero Pore Pad, which has held the No. 1 spot in the toner category on Amazon UK from December last year to the present.